No doctor can save Chelsea from Jose

20 August 2015 - 02:12 By Archie Henderson

Eva Carneiro is a 41-year-old doctor whose patients have included Didier Drogba, John Terry, Gary Cahill, Diego Costa and, just over a week ago, Eden Hazard. If that sounds like the medical waiting room at Chelsea FC, it used to be. Right now the doctor is no longer in.The doctor should have been pitch-side at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester on Sunday but wasn't. She's been banished from the touchline, from the team hotel and from the training ground by the arch-villain of English football, Jose Mourinho.Her crime was to respond to Chelsea's star player, Hazard, lying injured on the pitch during an English Premier League match played 11 days ago. With Chelsea drawing 2-2 with Swansea City (Swansea City, I ask you?), the interruption by the doctor and the team physio deprived Chelsea of a quick counter-attack, a winning goal - and Chelsea's first win of the season. Or so Mourinho believed.Said Mourinho: "Even if you are a medical doctor or secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game."So, apparently, they should teach you more about the offside rule at medical school than, say, posterior tibial tendon dysfunction.Blaming the draw on his medics (having already used up most of his other excuses) was not unusual for Mourinho. What was surprising was the size of Chelsea's medical staff. Carneiro was the first-team doctor (until last week, that is) and there is one for the reserve team and also a medical director. In their 3-0 defeat by Man City on Sunday, Chelsea had found yet another doctor and a new physio. This is more a medical drama than a football one. Not that any of the indignation or ridicule that followed will faze Mourinho. This is a man who thrives on baiting others. How else do you explain him deliberately provoking old Arsene Wenger, or telling Rafa Benitez's wife (after she'd claimed her husband had to clean up Mourinho's mess at Real Madrid) that she should concentrate on fixing his diet?But it has all been fun.The fun continued at the weekend when someone posted a picture of Cahill being treated for a bleeding nose last Sunday with a speech bubble on Carneiro's presumed replacement saying: "No idea what I'm doing." Another tweeted that Chelsea's record post-Carneiro has been: 100% losses, zero goals scored. After the 3-0 drubbing by Manchester City, another photo showed a Chelsea bus that looked as if it had been plying the Moloto Road route.The London quality papers assigned as many as six reporters each to the story last week, but most of the reports were the predictable stuff about sexism in sport and how that's not nice.The Sun, true to its tabloid instincts, got the best scoop of the lot in an interview with a former Carneiro boyfriend: "Sex-mad Chelsea doc ruined my life." If the life of Rupert Patterson-Ward (that really is his name) is ruined he'll hear only cheers from most people.It won't harm Carneiro. She looks like a woman who can handle the pressure. When you have shrugged off sexist abuse from yobbos at Old Trafford then Mourinho's whingeing is hardly going to frighten you.But Chelsea might think of expanding their medical staff still further, and bringing in a shrink for the manager...

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